I buried Robin Hood in his favourite place, the little paddock beside the Dulas. Across the brook, a blackbird sang requiem. Maid Marian was there, of course. She was, after all, his number-one wife. I shed no tears; I’d done my crying when the local vet, Peter Jinman, had informed me there was no hope. Robin Hood had irreversible anaemia due to a semi-tropical disease. The incomprehensible incongruity of it all was part of the hurt: the Dulas wanders its way in very English Herefordshire.
I liked him. And I think he liked me. There were times when he would deign to let me rub him under his chin as he stood four-square, head jutting forward. He was imperious, as if conscious of the glorious history attached to his kind. Ryeland sheep: first bred in the fifteenth century by the monks of Leominster Priory. Robin Hood was not just a sheep in a Welsh Marches paddock. He had ancestry — breeding, you might say.
It is odd how little most of us know about sheep, given how deeply entrenched they are in our culture. The Greek astrological sign Aries is a ram. In nursery rhymes, “Mary had a little lamb”, and “Baa-baa black sheep” was asked if he had any wool. On the screen Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep has gambolled about entertaining families for decades. On Easter cards lambs are no less frolicsome each passing year.
Those same little lambikins get slaughtered before they are a year old. On the supermarket shelf they are reduced to abstract, packaged commodities. To cope with this glaring contradiction — Little Gambolling Lamb in Field v. Big Rack of Lamb in the Oven — we downplay sheep’s intelligence and individuality. Hence the traducing expression “to be a sheep”, meaning to be a dumb, passive follower. Even a man as sensitive and attuned to nature as George Orwell made the sheep in Animal Farm the stupidest of the stupid, who go from mindlessly chanting “Four legs good, two legs bad” to “Two legs good, four legs bad”. When it comes to sheep, then, we suffer what psychologists call cognitive dissonance.
Or we blank the treatment we give them. Once upon a time, sheep were always raised outside in the fresh air, in a system that would, in today’s terminology, be called “extensive”, even “organic”. More than ten million sheep are now stuck in factory farms worldwide; sheep are also used extensively in biomedical research. About 24,000 are used annually for a range of purposes, from the study of Huntington’s disease and heart conditions to orthopaedics, organ transplants and genetic research (including cloning). There was a time when sheep were used in Argentina as fuel, their bodies thrown into furnaces. Like logs.
My family began farming them 800 years ago. Since I started, 25 years ago, I have learned that sheep are curious things. And sheep farming is a curious old business, where one can become attached to, loving, even, of animals raised for sale, for the pot. That has always been the case. As the Old Testament, which knew a thing or two about shepherding, tells it in II Samuel:
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